Captain's Log

Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs) Football Club is located in North London. The club is also known as Spurs. Tottenham's home ground is White Hart Lane. The club motto is Audere est Facere (To dare is to do).

First of all, let me say it’s great to be back playing for Tottenham and to be appointed captain has made it even more special. You look down the list of names that have held the title before and its fantastic to be among them.

But personally it doesn’t stop there, I want to win things with Tottenham and get the team going in the right direction once again. That means getting consistency in the league as well as enjoying some cup runs, to try to generate some excitement at the club.

I thought our support on the opening day here against Aston Villa was brilliant, it certainly helped the lads. It was a funny game, it often is on the first day, but I think 0-0 was probably the right result in the end. The lads put a lot of effort into the first half but didn’t quite get the break we were looking for and Villa had a couple of chances in the second half, so it was fair result.

The Everton game was a strange one. We were playing well, getting into the style of play the manager is asking us to play when we were hit by the sending off of Gary Doherty. It was ludicrous, it didn’t even seem like a foul at the time. The red card stunned us all and it just changed the whole game for us. It has subsequently been revoked, but that didn’t help us at the time when we needed 11 players on the pitch.

Doc and Ledley King were handling their front two really well and it was a big blow. It shocked us for five minutes, and in that time Gus was sent off as well, another strange decision and yet another shattering setback.

But afterwards we took the good things out of the game, mainly the way we battled well with nine men to get a result. Before the game we might have taken a draw so we were quite pleased with the final outcome.

Against Blackburn, again in the first half we played some nice football and could have been one or two goals up before they scored. That’s the disappointing thing, we’ve not taken those chances when they’ve come, we’ve got to be a bit more clinical and kill teams off. When you’re away from home, you do have spells of pressure and you’ve got to capitalise but we didn’t do that.

A note on the England boys, I think their win over Germany was a fantastic performance, I would put that down as the best since 1966 by an England team, it was truly outstanding. To come away from Munich with a 5-1 win to their credit certainly deserves a mention. I thought every player in an England shirt was superb.

With so many of our players away on international duty, it’s been difficult to prepare for today’s game, but we’ve worked hard and we are certainly focused on securing our first three points of the season. The fans helped us along against Aston Villa and if they can keep that up today, we’ll certainly respond. We can work hand in hand to get the results we all want.